To Spank Or Not To Spank

I read recently that the labour MP for Tottenham, Mr David Lammy, has said parents were “no longer sovereign in their own homes” and lived under constant fear that social workers would take away their children if they chastised them, and that this inability by parents to discipline their children, by smacking if necessary, was at the root of last summer’s inner city riots, rather than being caused by Government cuts or joblessness.

Needless to say, the liberal left, and its mouthpiece The Guardian, are jumping up and down in rage at the concept of a parent actually trying to instil discipline in their children, and spanking them if they fail to respond.

Their cry is that ‘Children have rights’ and that parents should reason with their children rather than punish them.

Have you ever tried to reason with a 10 year old? I’m sorry but pre-teenage children can’t be reasoned with, it’s not their fault but their brains are simply not sufficiently developed at that age to understand and accept the concept of reasoned argument, and by the time they are, in their mid-teens, it’s too late. The damage of a failure to instil discipline and acceptable boundaries at an early age has been done, and can’t be un-done.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve sat in court and listened to the distraught parent of a delinquent teenager say that their child takes no notice of what they say and just ‘does their own thing’, be that refusing to go to school, staying out late, taking drugs etc. I’m tempted, but refrain, from asking the parents what disciplinary measures they took, and what values they instilled in their children when they were young enough to be controlled.

It’s no co-incidence that the whole issue surrounding discipline within the family is anathema to the trendy liberal left. Their view has long been that discipline is repressive and their focus on banning smacking is simply a means to prevent the imposition of any parental discipline and thus to undermine all parental authority, and replace it with that of the state.

The ultimate ambition of the left is the imposition of a totalitarian state, the greatest threat to which is the cohesive family unit, break that down and the move to a totalitarian state becomes not just easier, but virtually inevitable.

One needs look no further than the twin youth organisations in pre-World War Two Germany, the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls, where the concept of parental discipline was subsumed by loyalty and obedience to the state based on the Jesuit motto ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man’.

If one wants a fictional, but chilling, exposition of the consequences of such a philosophy then read ‘This Perfect Day’, by Ira Levin, where the whole concept of family is supplanted by the state as family, ‘One Mighty Family’ being the state’s anthem.

So where does that leave us on the smacking controversy?

In my view, smacking a child is an action of last resort and represents a failure by a parent, by schools and by society as a whole, to instil in the child, from the cradle, a set of values, of boundaries and of parental and social discipline. If that is carried through rather than children being allowed to set their own code of behaviour, a 1960’s mantra of the liberal left, then smacking will rarely, if ever, become necessary.

However, where a parent does resort to spanking their child then they should be free of the fear that social workers will take away their children and be, as David Lammy has it, “sovereign in their own homes”. The cohesive family unit, free of state interference, is our greatest protection against totalitarianism.